wraitii

This is a great find, thanks Lion.Kanzen. I do believe this is something we might have not followed enough on some buildings.

Graphical options are currently a complete mess. My personal opinion is that if users want to get advanced, they should go to the config file. Otherwise, a "very fast-fast-nice-beautiful" setting (possibly with more than 4 levels, and possibly a few different bars for a few different things) should be enough. On the technical side, options are even uglier. It's absolutely the ugliest code in the game. Finally I do agree that most of our menus fall in the "open-source" conception of a menu: you can find everything, and you better know what it refers to.

I've found this very interesting series of article on Reddit: it dissects how GTA 5 renders a scene. I wanted to highlight some differences with 0 A.D. http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-2/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-3/ Now obviously GTA 5 uses deferred rendering, which isn't entirely possible for us so far because we support older OpenGL. It doesn't change much, except it makes it much easier to support many lights, something which could be interesting. In part 1, one thing to notice is the use of LOD, and more importantly the huge amount of instancing: the number of draw calls to render the scene is about 1900. We in 0 A.D. are quite regularly above those numbers on much "simpler" scenes. In part 2, it explains how they actually swapped a hill with models on it for a single model to reduce draw calls. On the other hand, it seems like GTA has found no better way than us to render the ocean, or indeed even reflections on the swimming pool.

We hope to have the release done in November, though no exact date is planned. Most of the remaining bugs are assumed fixed, we are now testing to verify those assumptions.

I believe we already have libraries to do memory pooling (and indeed, do in a bunch of places). We probably need to work on it, but the underlying stuff is there I think.

WhiteTreePaladin: could you post the commands.txt to that game? That could be more of an AI issue.

Those sound like very interesting MP maps.

Thanks for the comments Alex Yeah basically my idea would be a full revamp, so basically destroying your enemy would be a combination of raiding their supplies (if they're unprotected and you can find them), harassing, and actual sieging when you've built a big enough army.

Auras are kind of the "I like this game, but I'd like it better if it lagged just a bit more" components of this game. But it's pretty nice work overall

Imo it's a bug to do anything else. Components should not rely on other components being there unless it makes complete sense (e.g. Armour requiring Health).

I just saw this animation on Reddit: https://gfycat.com/SpiritedWarmFattaileddunnart , from this conversation here. I figured it was the coolest thing i've ever seen and that we could use the idea to revamp the splash screens in our trailers, which are currently this: There's a variety of ways this could go, but I thought it'd be a good idea to at least share the animation if someone is feeling inspired.

This is an idea I've had from reading /r/SubredditSimulator, a subreddit where bots post content using Markov chains. I've been giving it some thinking and I thought I'd share it. I don't have yet anything to show for it as I'm unable to code at the moment, but might try it later. The idea is quite simple: let's use some sort of markov Chains to make our random maps nicer. The biggest problems in our random maps, in terms of niceness, is not so much the larger elements (such as continent shape, ...) but the finer details. It just looks too random quite often, compared to scenarios. My idea is simply to use markov chains to replicate those scenario achievements in random maps. I won't go into details on markov chains (google it), but basically the idea would be to analyze scenarios of a similar biome (or may only one map, if it's good enough. Fiddling with the data would be needed.), and then use this as a database in a "beautification" pass for random maps. So RM would still create the maps as we do know, put terrains as we do know, then add basic "necessary" entities, such as trees, player entities, and could also add some larger beautification elements. Then we'd go into a beautification pass. I see a few ways this could work: For each "important" entity, check what "decoration" entities are usually placed around (from the markov chains) and place those.For each terrain type, check which decoration entities can be found aroundPossibly this would require us to "pre-sort" important entities by checking how many important entities they have around (as you might place different stuff around a lone tree than in a forest), but this would have to be checked. It might be extended to actual terrains too, to make it easier to have nice transitions, but I'm not entirely sure it'd work so well. Just an idea, anyways.

In fact, most old school RTS and their successors can be said "time-management" games. Multiplayer in AOE was about who was the fastest (all other things being equal). Same deal in Starcraft, same deal in most RTS in fact (there's this quote by a dev of Command and Conquer: "A player controls hundreds of units, dozens of buildings and many different events that are all happening simultaneously. There is only one player, and he can only pay attention to one thing at a time. Expert players can quickly flip between many different tasks, while casual gamers have more problems with this.” The only way to make an RTS that's not a clickfest is to remove this need for time management, which is probably why a lot of the more strategy-focused games are turn by turn to some extent. My only idea on how to do it in a game like 0 A.D. right now is to upscale the map by a factor of 50.

I've given this some more thoughts, and I'm convinced that a good way forward would be to scale everything up, including time. It'd play out more like SimCity, with some basic actions taken and then a lot of fast-forwarding. With support for some sort of supply lines and seasons. With seasons things can get really interesting strategically, and it helps make the game not too boring at any time. A gameplay that's more automatic, like some sort of huge-scale Caesar game, but where you can give a lot of input on a lot of things if you want. Basically make it a game about supply lines with real season support and things will get interesting. But really I'm also quite convinced that it's nowhere near being possible with the speed of current computers. It would require too much dialing down.

Looking pretty good, I must say. With a bit of work we might be able to put together a simple intro video using this.

I think your stone tower example would work better with individual upgrading and an option to ugprade all. But I agree that it might be useful.

I think you could improve the look of your oceans a bit. On your first map I'd increase the murkiness a bit and use a slightly more natural color for the deep water. On your second map I would also tweak the color and reduce the waviness.

Note that our AI is almost purely javascript and fairly documented so it's quite readable code, for an AI.

As the guy who sorta planned to do this but completely failed to push through, I must say great work. This is a really positive accomplishment for the future.

I’m writing after reading a post in /r/truegaming about RTS : http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/3961xs/what_happened_to_rts_games/ This will mostly be an “idea rambling” that I post here so that I can have a written trace somewhere but I do have some key points to make. I don't really expect a discussion though I'd gladly take part in one. The reddit thread discusses the reasons why we haven’t seen any new “true RTS” in the vein of e.g. AoE2 in the last circa 10 years. Except for the last, all the big reasons have been stuff we have already stumbled upon when discussing the future of 0 A.D.: It is very difficult to get an RTS rightAn average RTS is not “OK”, it’s actually “bad”, which means you must get it rightThe RTS community was actually divided between those that enjoyed the micromanagement, strategy and pressure (aka starcraft players), and those that relished more the overall macromanagement and/or basebuilding (those play Total War, city builders, Anno)MOBAs took the remaining RTS playersThe obvious problem here is that it is simply very difficult to make a good RTS that will strike the right chords for both the starcraft and the TW players. This requires having competitive MP and fun SP. Something that AoE2 had, and that for example AoE 3 failed (arguably SP simply wasn’t fun enough. Campaigns were subpar for the standards and the AI was bad). My main addition to these points would be that indeed the TW/citybuilder crowd would mostly play SP/casual MP, whereas the starcraft crowd took over actual MP and made it competitive. So basically unless you had a few friends to play in LAN, playing MP means bowing to the starcraft crowd in a classic RTS. I do believe 0 A.D. is on the good path to strike those two chords fine. We have a solid MP game, which can get fairly competitive (adjustments pending). SP is still very subpar, but the AI had gotten considerably better to the point that it might be time to start thinking outside the box a bit. Campaigns with triggers are now a possibility, and I have no doubt we’ll get interesting ones. Now, the problem is that none of this is really new. This isn’t a huge issue because we don’t really have concurrence, but still. The big thing that people want/wanted 0 A.D. to have is realistic ship movements and realistic formations combat. My personal opinion is that neither is achievable/really desirable given the current format. So the question stands: how can you keep the classic RTS formula yet still bring new stuff? Well, I do believe we have all the ingredients, except for one: map size. Imagine for a minute absolutely no gameplay changes to 0 A.D., but all maps are at least 20 times as big as a huge map right now; Suddenly unit travel time is no longer irrelevant. Suddenly attrition can be simulated in a way that makes sense. Suddenly strategic economic position becomes a real thing. Suddenly the base building aspect can become as important as the fighting. Suddenly trading makes sense, suddenly raiding becomes closer to the real thing. Ambushes matter. Territory control matters. And all units suddenly get more realistic. Now this would probably require some changes. The number of different resources might need to be bumped up a bit (perhaps with “raw/manufactured” variants of each material?). The “global stockpile” principle might need some adjustments, but I don’t think you’d need to go full Anno (perhaps with dropsites having “range” and some possibility for trading to move resources internally). Resources would be less accessible on the map, more scattered, so terrain control and scouting would become more important. Strategic positioning of your buildings would probably become much more important (note that this fits well with a system where buildings would be costlier, and possibly need individual upgrades) . One could probably introduce a “maintenance” cost but it’s not certain that this is a necessity. This means much slower games, more on the scale of EU3 or RTW. You’d start with a very simple base, discover your surroundings, and develop slowly into a full scale civ with multiple bases/towns, while still trying to crush your opponent. Rushing would basically be ruled out, but you probably still would be able to strike at vastly different times depending on your focus. An hour attack or a 8th hour attack would become the new strategy. Clickfest is almost automatically out. Yet it doesn't get boring because things would always be happening as you could vastly increase the number of actions before you have a complete city. As for combat, this would make formations finally relevant because the scales would be right, and for the rest you could keep current simplifications. I think this could be a very, very enticing game if done right. The fun of building a base and the fun of classic RTS warfare. It would shift the focus from “basically all military” to “50/50” and that would imo be a very good thing. As a final word of conclusion, I am not suggesting this is the direction 0 A.D. should take, if only because it would be quite a dramatic departure and I am about 100% sure that we could never make it work (it’d be forever too slow with the current engine). I'm saying if someone ever wants to restart an RTS from scratch, this is the way to go.

I think we could get the bloom Post-proc effect to look better, depending on how you actually want it. Those gold-chrome pillars look excellent!

Hm, that's possible, I'll look into it.

Looking great! Still can't believe how good the water looks and I made it...

Wowgetoffyourcellphone: that's what I'm saying, yes. I definitely agree with you on the AoM-like screen, though it would be good to have all civs in one screen and no scrolling, so maybe have smaller shields. But that's implementation details.

Second option.